Tag: Smith

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Article: Part 9 of Illegal Naked Shorting Series: The Risk/ Reward of Shorting Versus Buying Stocks is Extremely Unfavorable

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Part 9 of Illegal Naked Shorting Series: The Risk/ Reward of Shorting Versus Buying Stocks is Extremely Unfavorable

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 11 July 2019

In this report, I contrast the risk and reward of shorting versus buying stocks. When you unravel the economics and risk/ reward of shorting, it is clear to me that this is a highly risky, low return strategy. As argued in this report, I see shorting as a losers game if employed consistently over time as opposed to buying stocks which is a winners game. I see shorting as a niche strategy that is applicable on a short term trading basis for a very limited number of stock trades. I think you will agree with me as I go through the major risk and reward elements of shorting.

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Article: Part 8: Illegal Naked Shorting Series: Who or What is Cede and What Role Does Cede Play in the Trading of Stocks?

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Part 8: Illegal Naked Shorting Series: Who or What is Cede and What Role Does Cede Play in the Trading of Stocks?

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 1 July 2019

ost investors when they buy a publicly traded stock believe that they own a part of some company. They think that somewhere there is a stock certificate or some indication of ownership that has their name on it, but this is not the case. When you buy a “stock” you are actually purchasing a security that affords certain entitlement rights related to registered stock which actual owners hold. The registered shares of a private company are directly owned by shareholders. In contrast, the registered shares of nearly all publicly traded equities are owned by Cede & Co., which is the nominee of the Depository Trust Company (DTC). (A nominee is a company whose name is given as having title to a stock, but does not receive the financial benefits of ownership.) Cede is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust Company (DTC) which is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and the DTCC is a private company owned by elite Wall Street firms and money center banks. If you need background or a refresher on DTC and DTCC, click on this link. Effectively, elite Wall Street firms and money center banks, not institutions and individual investors, own almost all of the registered shares of publicly traded companies in the US.

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Article: Part 7: Illegal Naked Shorting: DTCC Continuous Net Settlement and Stock Borrowing Programs Have Loopholes That Facilitate Illegal Naked Shorting

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Part 7: Illegal Naked Shorting: DTCC Continuous Net Settlement and Stock Borrowing Programs Have Loopholes That Facilitate Illegal Naked Shorting

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 31 May 2019

There is an integral relationship between the DTCC and hedge funds. The DTCC is owned by Prime Brokers; these are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrell Lynch and other household name investment banks. Prime Brokers provide basic services to hedge funds that allow them to trade with multiple brokerage houses while maintaining a centralized master account at their prime broker containing cash and securities. The prime broker offers stock loan services, portfolio reporting, consolidated cash management and other services. Hedge fund support is a very meaningful percentage of the net income of Prime Brokers.

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Article: Part 6 Illegal Naked Shorting: The SEC’s Regulation SHO is Intended to Prevent Illegal Naked Shorting, But is Ineffective

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Part 6 Illegal Naked Shorting: The SEC’s Regulation SHO is Intended to Prevent Illegal Naked Shorting, But is Ineffective

Larry Smith

Smith On Stock, 22 May 2019

In previous blogs I traced the history of stock trading from the 1960s when stock certificates and cash were physically exchanged to settle trades to the paper free, totally electronic system that exists today. Instead of owning stock certificates, we now own digital entries located somewhere in the vaults of the inscrutable Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC). This electronic system is absolutely critical to the functioning of our capital markets and our strong economic system. However, the DTCC and the prime brokers who own it have made the clearing and settlement system virtually non-transparent. This enables the routine manipulation of primarily but not exclusively, small stocks through illegal naked shorting.

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Article: Part 5 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation: Traditional Shorting Compared to Naked Shorting (Both Legal and Illegal)

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Part 5 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation: Traditional Shorting Compared to Naked Shorting (Both Legal and Illegal)

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 29 April 2019

This is the fifth blog in the series that I am writing to describe how illegal naked shorting is used broadly and massively to manipulate the stock prices of (primarily small) companies. I have been studying illegal naked shorting for nearly five years and I have found it to be incredibly complex and disturbingly it is widely practiced on Wall Street. My earlier blogs were intended to build a foundation needed to understand future blogs.

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Article: Part 4 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation: Who are the Key Players?

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Article: Part 4 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation: Who are the Key Players?

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 17 April 2019

I worked on Wall Street as an analyst for nearly 40 years and was involved in the stock market on a day to day basis. Throughout this time, I was focused on fundamental developments that would give an insight into the potential for a company to grow its sales and profits and then trying to translate that into future stock performance. Like many investors, I believed that this was the overarching factor in predicting future stock performance. I had no inkling and I would have been shocked if someone had told me ten years ago what the experience of the past decade has taught, i.e., in many, many cases (particularly for small companies) fundamentals are not the most important factor determining the stock price.

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Article: Part 3 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation – Prime Brokers and the DTCC Have a Troubling Monopoly on Clearing and Settling Stock Trades

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Part 3 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation – Prime Brokers and the DTCC Have a Troubling Monopoly on Clearing and Settling Stock Trades

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 11 April 2019

I am not going to attempt to show in any detail how the clearing, settlement and depositing of securities system evolved from the crisis of the mid-60s to what is now a totally paperless, electronic system. But briefly, Congress passed legislation in 1971 for two new service organizations, whose objectives were the speeding up the clearance and settlement process. The Depository Trust Company (DTC) was established as the nation’s principal securities depository, with the mission to convert paper certificates to electronic book entries and to immobilize the paper certificates and keep them in a vault at the DTC. (No more shuttling by messengers.) The National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) was established at the same time to speed up clearance and settlement services.

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Article: Part 2 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation- Conventional Wisdom on How Short Sales are Executed

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Part 2 in Series on Illegal Naked Shorting’s Role in Stock Manipulation- Conventional Wisdom on How Short Sales are Executed

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks, 4 April 2019

The current conventional wisdom on how a short sale is transacted is that a short seller borrows stock from a specific investor who is long the stock, then at some later point buys back the stock in the open market. They then return the stock to that “same specific investor” from whom it was borrowed. Before I met ShareIntel, this is what I thought happened, but as I began to work with them and to do more research on my own, I was jolted when I realized that this is not what goes on in the real world of Wall Street and in later reports I will address how the actual process facilitates widespread naked shorting that enables stock manipulation by some hedge funds..

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Article: Part 1 in a Series of Reports on Blatant, Widespread Stock Manipulation that is Enabled by Illegal, Naked Shorting

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Part 1 in a Series of Reports on Blatant, Widespread Stock Manipulation that is Enabled by Illegal, Naked Shorting

Larry Smith

Smith On Stocks,  27 March 2019

I am convinced that price manipulation by Wall Street bad actors is endemic in the capital markets and swindles legitimate investors out of billions of dollars each year. This criminal enterprise is particularly directed against the stocks of emerging growth companies that are at the cutting edge of technological innovation and jobs creation and are so critical to solving humanity’s greatest challenges. Because my research deals with biotechnology, I am most aware of innumerable, vicious attacks on biotechnology companies, but the scheme is perpetrated on all types of companies, primarily small but also large.

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Article: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Tells Corporate CEOs to Engage in Better Eyewash

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Tells Corporate CEOs to Engage in Better Eyewash

Yves Smith, 21 January 2019

One of the sorry spectacles of modern life is having prominent individuals who profit from and serve as prime exemplars of major social ills trying to depict themselves as part of the solution, when they haven’t gone through any sort of Damascene conversion o give their virtue-signalling even a thin veneer of legitimacy. Today’s object lesson is Larry Fink, the Chairman and CEO of the ginormous fund manager BlackRock (not to be confused with the private equity/alternative asset manager Blackstone). BlackRock, with $6.2 trillion under management as of October, 2018, is the largest asset manager in the world,. Continue reading “Article: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Tells Corporate CEOs to Engage in Better Eyewash”

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Article: Northwest: Analysis of a Coordinated Short Selling Attack Against the Stock (NWBO, $4.69)

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Northwest: Analysis of a Coordinated Short Selling Attack Against the Stock (NWBO, $4.69)

LARRY SMITH, 20 October 2015

Again I can see some people scoffing at my suggestion of such broad based criminal actions but consider the following. Martin Martola of SAC Capital was sentenced to 9 years in prison because he had paid one of the primary investigators in the phase 3 trial of Elan’s bapineuzumab in Alzheimer’s disease to learn of results before they were made publicly available. The clinical trial investigator tipped Martola that the phase 3 trial was unsuccessful and Martola and his employer SAC Capital executed trades that resulted in $275 million of profits. SAC’s founder Steve Cohen was charged with the same crime, but Martola refused to testify against Cohen and he was not indicted. However, SAC made a $1.8 billion settlement for criminal and civil settlements and agreed not to manage outside money. Continue reading “Article: Northwest: Analysis of a Coordinated Short Selling Attack Against the Stock (NWBO, $4.69)”

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Article: Illegal Naked Short Selling Appears to Lie at the Heart of an Extensive Stock Manipulation Scheme

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Illegal Naked Short Selling Appears to Lie at the Heart of an Extensive Stock Manipulation Scheme

Larry Smith

SmithOnStocks, 16 June 2015

Only a motivated enforcement agency with subpoena power and an accompanying powerful enforcement infrastructure can prove that naked shorting is at the heart of an extensive stock manipulation scheme. However, I believe that the observational evidence is overwhelming that naked shorting practices are widely used to manipulate the stock prices of emerging biotechnology companies as well as many other small and large companies. Unfortunately, naked shorting is an investment variable that investors must understand if they are going to make investments in the emerging biotechnology space in particular and the equity markets in general.

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Filing: SEC v Merrill Lynch

Filing

SEC v Merrill Lynch

1 June 2015

These proceedings concern Merrill’s violations of Regulation SHO (Reg SHO”) of the Exchange Act, in connection with its practices relating to its execution of short sales. As described more fully below, the violations arose from two separate issues concerning Merrill’s use of its “easy to borrow” lists.

PDF (11 pages): SEC v Merrill Lynch

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Article: Why I Will Never Buy Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc, HSBC Holdings plc And Standard Chartered PLC

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Why I Will Never Buy Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc, HSBC Holdings plc And Standard Chartered PLC

Rupert Hargreaves, 10 November 2014

The godfather of value investing, Benjamin Graham, made it quite clear that the process of investing is nothing like speculation: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return.” On the other hand, speculation is more akin to gambling, with no return guaranteed.

With this in mind, it’s easy to arrive at the conclusion that banks, which rely on leverage and trading to make a living, can never be deemed true ‘investments’ due to the speculative nature of their businesses. And this is the reason why I’m staying away from banks like Royal Bank of Scotland (LSE: RBS), HSBC (LSE: HSBA) and Standard Chartered (LSE: STAN). Continue reading “Article: Why I Will Never Buy Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc, HSBC Holdings plc And Standard Chartered PLC”

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Article: FINRA Fines Merrill Lynch $6 Mln for Failing to Prevent Naked Short Selling

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FINRA Fines Merrill Lynch $6 Mln for Failing to Prevent Naked Short Selling

Victor Golovtchenk, 28 October 2014

According to an announcement by the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), U.S. bank Merrill Lynch’s Professional Clearing Corp. (Merrill Lynch PRO) got fined $3.5 million for violating Regulation SHO. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) implemented this rule in 2005 to prevent the conducting of a practice called naked short selling.

Merrill Lynch’s affiliated broker-dealer Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated (Merrill Lynch) has also been fined $2.5 million for failing to establish, maintain and enforce supervisory systems and procedures related to Regulation SHO and other areas, according to the FINRA announcement. Continue reading “Article: FINRA Fines Merrill Lynch $6 Mln for Failing to Prevent Naked Short Selling”

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